• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    10 days ago

    First of all. Kids. Ha. No.

    However, this is an interesting observation, since homes used to be placed where you entertained guests. You had people over for an evening to drink and share stories and everything.

    But, we’re not a sentimental age. Millennials, Gen Z, etc… Everything has been made to be temporary for us. There is no permanence. We don’t buy homes, we have to rent because all of the homes are being purchased by a handful of people in that area and their being converted into rentals. The most expensive things we own are our cars, and even then, it’s probably a lease, so that’s basically like renting the car anyways, just with more steps. We don’t need to get together for social time in our homes. We tend to go out and borrow a table for an evening at the local pub, or go to the beach or something. We rarely meet in person, often drinking alone but together over the vast world wide web.

    Speaking of the Internet, there’s so many people on there, that most of our connections become extremely temporary. We’ll meet, play together, laugh together, and depart within hours. The likelihood of seeing eachother again is slim to none, and even if it happens, we probably won’t remember.

    We’re in an age where you’re not friends with the friends you have on Facebook… Your Facebook friends is a long list of people you met once or twice and never saw again, now permanently a part of your life on a friend’s list you never look at. It’s become a meaningless thing to be on someone’s friends list.

    All of the things that should be permanent are so ubiquitous that they’ve lost any meaning that they had, and that’s how we live. Temporary particle board furniture, that will swell up and disintegrate with high enough humidity. Temporary connections from tinder or whatever. Temporary hangouts at a local location… We don’t “do” hosting anymore, and when we do, everyone is too focused on a screen to notice that your furniture is falling apart or that you have no unnecessary stuff . Having things is a statement of wealth, because you need to have some place to put them, which means real estate. We are not wealthy. Our parents generation ensured we couldn’t be when they became capitulent in the dismantling of unions, and the destruction of the middle class. They spent their wealth and our inheritance on retirement, which was made to be worthless sums of money by the economic inflation that they wrought.

    The current generations have been beaten into submission to accept everything as temporary and be happy about it. We are frequently convinced that we like it like this.

    We do not value these things because it represents a permanence that we neither care for, nor have we ever enjoyed.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 days ago

    Well no, because the left will still be in perfect condition when you die but the right is a cheap piece of shit that will disintegrate if you sneeze on it.

  • stinky@redlemmy.com
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    10 days ago

    Inheritance value is not furniture’s most desirable trait. Sometimes it’s price, or mobility, or disposability. The meme suggests that people in wholly different circumstances should be measured equally, and they shouldn’t. It’s a stupid, cruel meme and I despise it.

  • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    11 days ago

    I very much like the old style furniture but one thing quick to realize is that most of it doesn’t really have much organizing space.

    It’s a show of craftsmanship, it is something to look at but that is it.

    I’m planning to build a lot of furniture for myself and the top requirement is internal space, followed by ease of assembly and modularity.

    Visual impact can be achieve by different varnishes or finishes or, what I’m considering lately, pyro engraving or ink line work, underneath the varnish.

    • klemptor@startrek.website
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      11 days ago

      It’s a show of craftsmanship, it is something to look at but that is it.

      It’s also a pain in the ass to dust with all those nooks and crannies. I can appreciate the craftsmanship but I won’t bring anything like that into my house.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        11 days ago

        I remember my grandma using these anti static wood cleaning spray for it and it worked. Or just plain cedar oil.

        • klemptor@startrek.website
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          11 days ago

          Yeah I know how to clean this type of furniture, it’s just a lot of work that I’d rather not have to do. All of my furniture has minimal detail and no filigree. It looks way less gaudy and is so much easier to clean.

          • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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            11 days ago

            I agree. It’s a relic of another time, when having servants was common fare or it was obligatory having one person always at home, usually the wife.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      I also planned on such, but the desk would require a metal frame, and that means either expensive aluminium profile with even more expensive bolting hardware, or welding. Learning to weld properly would take a while, and my father doesn’t wnat me to use bolts or make it anywhere “modular” to make it “very strong”.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        At some point I’m going to tackle designing and building a computer desk. I don’t think humanity has done it right yet.

        I came up in the 90’s and 00’s when everyone had a Windows ME era Compaq set up on one of those Bush brand tube-and-panel desks that was supposedly purpose built to be a computer desk, but they STILL ended up way overcrowded because they STILL hadn’t thought about all the stuff you would have with a computer. So a subwoofer, the computer itself, both, or some other piece of equipment would end up in the foot well, cable management is a nightmare, no one in the furniture industry has ever acknowledged the existence of the UPS…

        Then everyone got laptops, then everyone got phones and tablets, and then oh yeah desktop PCs are a thing, what are desktop PC gamers using for desks these days? A rectangular slab on L-shaped legs. Is the current state of the art in computer desk design. A table. Weirdly thick and heavy, and completely featureless.

        It’s a challenge I want to tackle.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          10 days ago

          Can do.

          Here’s a little plant stand I built, that one is white oak and finished with spar varnish, it’s currently living under a massive peace lily.

          Built a pair of these end tables to go on either side of my couch. Tops are oak, the structures are yellow pine. I put a secret compartment in one of the drawers. I’ve always wanted to do that.

          A dining room cupboard I more recently built. Walnut, with poplar internals. I’m particularly proud of the grain matched drawer fronts, the entire face frame is made from one solid board.

          The hutch that goes with that cupboard currently looks like this:

          And since the tonguing is done, I’ll take my leave and go.

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
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    10 days ago

    There’s a song about this phenomenon in Québecois French called Dégénération, from Mes Aïeux.

    It starts with your great great grand father clearing the land, your great grand father plowing the land, your grand father making a profit out of it, your father selling it to be a white collar, and you, living in a one room apartment, owing debts to corporations.

    The lyrics are pretty conservative and portray a rosy past, but it goes with the traditional style and the fact the band’s name means “my ancestors”. This being said, the song is still pretty spot on about this phenomenon. Here’s a link to the translated lyrics, and the song.

    EDIT: Oh and there’s a parody (no translation, sorry) stating the obvious, like “your great great great grand mother, she took dumps in a bucket, and she only had three teeth left, but it was paradise.”

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      The crazy thing about the modern economy is that we’re - on paper - significantly wealthier per capita than our predecessors. But the social expectations of our progeny are so much higher (I’m not having six kids and expecting them to all just become subsistence farmers like I was) and the social infrastructure has degraded so rapidly (sending my son to a public school in Texas feels like borderline child abuse). Children are viewed as a strategically planned luxury - like a vacation home or a retirement account - instead of a natural consequence of two people having lots of unprotected sex in their 20s.

      What’s more, what we have normally viewed as a valuable domestic asset - a large number of young, healthy, educated people - is increasingly booked as an expense bordering on extravagance. Meanwhile, what we have normally viewed as an expense - a large, heavily manned security state - is now seen as a critical cost-saving tool to mitigate the risk of foreign 20-year-olds sneaking into our country to do highly profitable labor.

      All this in a set of countries regarded as the wealthiest in human history. We’re too wealthy to have kids. It’s all so fucking backwards.

      • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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        10 days ago

        My parents raised me on an acre in a house that my parents built with them both having reasonable salaries. My partner and I make more combined than they ever did we would never be able to give kids a life even close to as good as we had growing up.

        So we aren’t having kids, we will just live as good a life as we can and her nieces will inherit what we have when we die.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Yes, there are plenty of other factors for the enshittification, but…

    Furniture used to be a thing you saved for and bought once, for life. Consumers used to think in those terms, now we’re like, meh, it’s cheap enough. Same for appliances. There was only a few choices in the refrigerator space. People talked, compared notes, knew what brand ranked where in quality. Now we’re overrun with choice, aim low and bitch about quality.

    Also, if you want nice shit, the used market is booming. And more, I’m shocked what I find on the side of the road. Right now I’m looking at a perfectly nice, solid wood table getting stormed on. Wife found it last week, no room in the house or use for it, so there it sits.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      11 days ago

      For me it’s more that I have to move all the time to keep the rent down and moving solid wood furniture is a nightmare.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      I’m probably going to publish a book on this topic at some point. Furniture as a craft stopped in 1940.

      After 1940, anything new that came out came from industry, not from craft. You can still find actual craftsmen making furniture, hell the Stickley factory is still open. You can buy mission style furniture made of quarter sawn white oak to this day. And it’s exactly like what you could buy 100 years ago, for about 100 times the price.

      Meanwhile, there never has been a craftsmanship around modern furniture needs. Computer furniture has entirely been the realm of flat packed particle board, double wide mobile homes the nation over are having their built-in entertainment centers ripped out because a 75 inch flat panel doesn’t fit anywhere in it. You can buy a dining room cabinet, or a bedroom armoire, but I haven’t seen craft furniture made for home theater or video game enthusiasts.

      Not that anyone young enough to like video games will ever be given the chance to have enough money to buy real furniture.

      We really do need to start those lynch riots.

  • Delphia@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    In all honesty, I’m glad that I dont have any of that shit on the left.

    Dealing with an estate is enough work without adding guilt into the equation, my will for my daughter literally says “If I did my job right, this is all just stuff. Dont be precious about it because its mine, unless its specifically mentioned I really dont give a shit about it. Do what you need or want to do.”

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 days ago

    Sorry, people who came before me. My storage is way more space-efficient. It’s not like I’ll ever own a house, so this is a priority.

    • swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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      11 days ago

      Mine had it until my mom’s generation. She seemed to take pleasure in telling me she was going to throw it out unless I took it while I was living in a place where I couldn’t.